Music by Max Steiner
The Epic Life of Hollywood's Most Influential Composer
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
During a seven-decade career that spanned from 19th century Vienna to 1920s Broadway to the golden age of Hollywood, three-time Academy Award winner Max Steiner did more than any other composer to introduce and establish the language of film music. Indeed, revered contemporary film composers like John Williams and Danny Elfman use the same techniques that Steiner himself perfected in his iconic work for such classics as Casablanca, King Kong, Gone with the Wind, The Searchers, Now, Voyager, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, and over 200 other titles. And Steiner's private life was a drama all its own. Born into a legendary Austrian theatrical dynasty, he became one of Hollywood's top-paid composers. But he was also constantly in debt--the inevitable result of gambling, financial mismanagement, four marriages, and the actions of his emotionally troubled son.
Throughout his chaotic life, Steiner was buoyed by an innate optimism, a quick wit, and an instinctive gift for melody, all of which would come to the fore as he met and worked with luminaries like Richard Strauss, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, the Warner Bros., David O. Selznick, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Frank Capra. In Music by Max Steiner, the first full biography of Steiner, author Steven C. Smith interweaves the dramatic incidents of Steiner's personal life with an accessible exploration of his composing methods and experiences, bringing to life the previously untold story of a musical pioneer and master dramatist who helped create a vital new art with some of the greatest film scores in cinema history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In colorful prose and with finely detailed scenes, music journalist Smith (A Place for West Side Story's Legacy) draws deeply on archives in this first full biography of composer Max Steiner (1888 1971), famous for his scores for Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. Smith traces Steiner's life from his childhood in Vienna, where his father managed lavish theatrical productions, through his early days in Hollywood, and his work with stars such as Bette Davis and director John Huston, to his final decade, when he composed scores that brimmed over with joy and melody, including the theme for A Summer Place in 1959. From the beginning of his career, Steiner threw himself into his work and was so obsessed with his feelings for music that he often struggled to maintain lasting personal relationships. Smith vividly illustrates the chaotic atmosphere into which Steiner came to RKO in 1929 and the ways he worked with audio engineer Murray Spivack to introduce scores at a time when producers were often dubious about the potential of sound to transform movies. Smith adeptly details the process of making films and Steiner's involvement in scoring them, such as when in 1933 he hired a team of orchestrators to maintain stylistic consistency in Melody Cruise. Filled with great detail of early Hollywood music, Smith's biography serves as the definitive study of the composer.
